True

by Riikka Pulkkinen

  Anna picks out a whitefish from the seafood counter. They wander absentmindedly among the shelves, choose some vegetables for the grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, marshmallows, ice cream.

  THE ICE CREAM is melting in their bowls. They’re sitting on the porch with their arms around each other.

  They talk lazily about Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, which they saw last week at the film archives. Matias thought it was fragmentary and overly arty. Saara thought it was chauvinistic. That’s Godard’s idea of what a woman is, she said, with exaggerated incredulity. Nothing but temperamental princesses! A line from the movie has tattooed itself into Anna and she doesn’t want to shake it off: We are made of dreams, and dreams are made of us.

  She doesn’t know if the line refers to the woman, whom the man can’t understand, or to the time that the characters in the film are living in, or to dreams, which people can’t live without, or to all of reality, everything that happens between people.

  Anna’s overcome with a surprising feeling of well-being, as if she were entirely herself and at the same time someone slightly different. The blackbird’s call has a friendly, familiar sound, louder than before, but she can’t find its dark shape among the foliage anymore.

  “I’ll tear up that floor tomorrow while you clean the shed,” Matias says, looking satisfied with himself, the way a man who performs mental labor every day sometimes looks when he has a chance to putter with his hands, build something, discover hidden abilities.

  “Don’t start dismantling anything by yourself. Wait till Dad gets here.”

  Anna’s mother, father, and her sister Maria are coming tomorrow. Her grandparents are coming, too, if Grandma’s condition will allow it.

  Anna hears her mother in the commanding tone of her voice, the same tone her mother uses with her father sometimes, which always makes him angry. Now these emphatic words give her a secret joy. She’s exasperatingly like her mother, and it doesn’t alarm her at all.

  “I know how to do it,” Matias says. “I’ll pull up the floor, then we can get started nailing down a new one right away.”

  “Well, all right,” Anna allows, pretending to be the one giving in, but pleased.

  Her father suggested reflooring the sauna porch when they saw him last week—he had a manly discussion with Matias about it at the front door when they arrived. Anna thought for a moment that maybe her father had always wanted a boy. With Matias he could talk about boards and nails and percussion drills and look out across the lake and say magnanimously, There’s beer in the fridge if you want some.

  THEY TAKE A sauna in a mood of goodwill, the words of their argument dissolving in the steam. Matias rubs lotion on Anna’s arms and back afterward, spreads apricot scent on her legs, and it all leads to where they guessed it might.

  A mist floats over the lawn, Anna can see it from the window before she lies down on the linen blanket, a little damp from the sauna. Matias comes into her amazingly carefully and passionately. It suddenly feels like they are different people, who are doing this together for the first time. Anna herself is a little more passionate than at home, Matias strong and gentle.

  What does the loon think, or the blackbird, when they hear this, Anna thinks just before she reaches her peak, rising and dropping at the same time.

  Afterward they sit on the porch and Matias strums the guitar. Anna drinks Sol from the bottle, pulls her knees up against her chest. It’s a little cold, but not too. She reads a copy of Seura that she found in the bottom drawer of the chest in the dressing room. A middle-aged writer and a pop singer telling about their new happiness.

  Anna reads the writer’s words aloud: “I finally know what love is.”

  “What year is that from?”

  “Ninety-seven.”

  “Does he tell?”

  “Tell what?”

  “What love is?”

  “No.”

  THE MORNING IS rainy. Clouds hang dreary above the treetops. The blackbird has disappeared. Matias puts on his old jeans and takes his tools to the sauna. Anna follows and watches him cheerfully begin his work.

  She goes back up the path. Opens the door of the shed. The same smell, the same charcoal drawings on the shelves and half-finished paintings on their easels.

  She doesn’t know where to begin. She moves the boxes, paint cans, and gardening tools out of the way.

  The orange painting strikes her eye almost immediately. It’s unfinished. It looks so ordinary that she nearly passes it by before she realizes. It’s a picture of her, with all her budding seriousness, bushy-haired, dark-eyed.

  An irresistible feeling comes over her: she suddenly knows that she can’t go on living if she doesn’t have the painting for her own. She has to bring it home. She has to hang it on the wall. The photo that was on her wall in the apartment on Pengerkatu for two years—the tasteless Aino pastiche—can collect dust in the closet. She’s going to hang this picture on the wall.

  The painting is a condensed version of her, somehow. It holds all that she was as a child and all that was still just germinating inside her. If she leaves the painting here in the garden shed at Tammilehto, at the mercy of visiting squirrels, she’ll be leaving herself here. Or worse yet, she’ll be leaving her childhood, those shapeless fears and hopes that she can’t name but which she nevertheless recognizes as her own.

  She takes hold of the painting carefully, puts it in front of the others. When she looks at it from up close she notices that her grandfather has mixed the paint carefully in the eyes to create the right darkness. Maybe there’s also something other than ordinary oil paint in the eyes. He’s good at that sort of thing, mixing in who knows what—aluminum powder, ashes, sawdust, sometimes even silver. Anna is taken with the idea that in her eyes, at the place where the change in hue expresses hope, at the place that reflects all that hasn’t yet been realized, all that a child carries inside her, there’s a pinch of silver.

  If Anna tries hard enough, she can clearly remember what she was thinking on the day her grandfather painted her eyes. She was making a precocious decision not to tell lies, because she had been grounded the week before for tricking Maria. She had made up a story of kidnappers who drove a red car and snatched children away from the street where they lived and Maria had been afraid to come out from under the bed all afternoon.

  Maria cried about it to their parents in the kitchen that evening, and they had to use some harsh words. She had been to Fazer for ice cream with her grandpa—she’d reluctantly eaten a meatball at dinner for the privilege, a dinner she still remembers: ketchup and meatballs and the clock in the kitchen ticking. She’d read Tintin on the living room carpet. An ordinary day, a prototype of childhood, of hopes and secret worries veiled in songs and games.

  Anna decides she’ll take the painting, perhaps in secret. She’ll have it framed and hang it on the wall because she knows that it is more her than she could ever be.

  “Ready to eat?” Matias asks behind her. He’s been working a good while.

  Steam is coming off him. In these few hours he’s acquired a workingman’s cheery bravado. Anna goes to him and kisses him.

  “So, have you had enough?”

  “No,” he says lightheartedly. “I’m taking out the wall. It’s taking awhile, because it’s lined with old newspapers. I spend half the time reading. You wouldn’t believe the journalism in the old Uusi Suomi or Helsingin Sanomat.”

  Anna gently pinches him.

  “I should make a note never to hire a historian to do demolition.”

  “Did they remodel the sauna, when the main building burned down? The newspapers in the wall are from the late 1960s. What year was the fire?”

  “August 1967. I don’t know if they rebuilt the sauna, too. You should ask my grandparents. Maybe they decided to renovate the whole shebang.”

  Matias looks at the o
range painting.

  “What’s this? Is that you? This is like the one at your parents’ house. Is this the mate to it?”

  “Yes. I’ve been pestering my grandpa to tell me where it was for aeons. It’s been right here all these years. It’s a little unfinished, but I was thinking about taking it to have it framed anyway.”

  “And hang it on our wall?”

  “Why not?”

  Anna notices herself searching Matias’s gaze for his opinion of the painting. Is it tasteless? Is it pointless, garish, as garish as the Aino photo? Or maybe Matias just doesn’t want to see her on their wall, sad-eyed, looking out with a child’s gaze at everything that happens. Her storytelling, truth-mangling, six-year-old self watching over their lives.

  “Why not,” he says finally. “Let’s take it with us on Sunday. We can drop it off at the framers on the way home—if your grandfather will give it to us, that is.”

  “Of course he will.”

  13

  HE WAS TENSE. The last time they’d been here was in the fall, when Elsa was still strong.

  “Should we buy some water?” he said, to have something to say.

  It was strange to be tense around his own wife. He felt as if they were living some very old time, from fifty years before, all over again. He had listened to Elvis the day he met Elsa. Suddenly he remembered Elvis, how nervous he was. His hands gripped the steering wheel, fifty years melting away.

  “Why?” Elsa said. “I’m sure the water there is working.”

  He looked at her surreptitiously, and she turned her head. A little smile.

  “Just let me know if you get tired.”

  “I will, I will.”

  He was pleased when he didn’t see any cars as they pulled into the yard; Anna and Matias were out shopping for groceries and Eleonoora, Eero, and Maria hadn’t yet arrived. He could have a moment alone with Elsa.

  It had rained. The trees in the yard held the drops proudly, as if aware, devoted to the task. Elsa stepped carefully out of the car, felt the ground for a moment, then walked purposefully toward the sauna. Where did the illness show? Nowhere, really. Her legs were sticks under her pants, but you didn’t notice it if you didn’t look closely.

  “The whole floor will probably have to go,” she shouted from the sauna porch. “And part of the wall,” this time from inside.

  He opened the door of the cabin. He was pierced by his fondness for Tammilehto and their shared days here. He remembered the smell of all the breakfasts, bread and butter and ham, the smell of coffee and cucumbers and sun shining in the window.

  Anna learned to walk here one summer, and so did Maria, a few years later. Eleonoora and Eero had been married in the yard. How long ago was it? Twenty-five years. He had walked down the aisle with Eleonoora. He remembered her damp hand, her slightly terrified smile. She had stopped for a moment, as if she were having second thoughts. She wants to call it off, Martti had thought. He had already seen it all in his mind—they would drive away together, go to the service station, the veil still on her head, like a meringue. He wouldn’t ask why, since it wasn’t a father’s business. They would buy cheese sandwiches and coffee, not caring if people stared.

  But Eleonoora had said, Well, let’s go.

  Eero had looked at her across the yard and she had smiled at him, a little dazed, as if she wanted to say, This is stupid, it’s insane! I want to embark on this crazy thing with you!

  He picked up a cookie from a plate on the table—a Domino. The damp had made it leathery. He liked the way it tasted. It was right for this place.

  Elsa came inside.

  “Let’s make some coffee,” Martti said.

  “The boy’s torn up half the sauna,” Elsa said cheerfully.

  “If it’s rotten, it should be taken out.”

  “What if it was rotten from the start?” she said.

  He searched her face for a sign in her words, for the familiar, hurt expression, the crease between her eyebrows.

  He pulled her closer.

  “We were in a hurry to have a new sauna. In a hurry to rebuild.”

  “You were the one who was in a hurry. We didn’t have to repair the sauna at all. It wasn’t necessary.”

  “Maybe. Maybe it was me.”

  He was quiet for a moment, letting his gaze wander.

  “I ordered some new paints,” he heard himself saying. “I bought canvases. Paper, other materials. I got a little carried away. I could start up a little shop of my own with everything I bought. So I’ll have a lot of materials to choose from if I want to try again.”

  Elsa raised her eyebrows. “That’s wonderful.”

  He had gone the week before to Rautalampi’s art supply store. He didn’t actually know what he intended to do with the supplies. Did he even want to start again? The whole thing felt somewhat frivolous. Still, he’d put in an order. Rautalampi had chuckled when he saw him.

  “Going to try it one more time?”

  “We’ll see. I might buy something. Pigments. Maybe you could order me some of the powdered ones from France, the ones I used to use. Can you still get those?”

  Rautalampi had run the same art supply store and frame shop on Uudenmaankatu for decades. A lot of people ordered things from the Internet these days, but Martti had doggedly stuck with Rautalampi—there are some things that shouldn’t change. I knew you’d come back, Rautalampi said good-naturedly. I kept telling myself, Ahlqvist will come back. I’m sure he’ll want to work again some day.

  A strange, pleasant sense of shame had rushed over him, the same feeling he remembered from his younger years, the first few times he got caught drawing in his sketchbook.

  They’d had a cup of coffee in the back room and smoked a pipe of good tobacco. As he was walking out of the shop he’d felt the same enthusiasm for painting that he’d had when he was young.

  Elsa went into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets.

  “Good. Anna and Matias bought some fresh coffee.”

  She poured water in the pot, smelled the ground coffee with her eyes closed as she usually did before measuring it out. Martti picked up the gesture and drew it precisely in his mind. Elsa saw his look, flipped the switch of the coffeemaker with a smile. It made a crunching sound and then started to gurgle.

  “Maybe I’ll just sit here,” Elsa said, sitting down at the table. “I’ll just sit here and you can take down all my essentials. If you’re thinking about painting, you could try painting me.”

  He laughed. “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “Try,” Elsa said.

  She crossed her legs, leaned on her arms, closed her eyes.

  Here was Elsa’s whole face. It was so rare to be able to see her whole, all of the versions of her at the same time.

  He remembered one time like that. Elsa had been packing her clothes for some trip. He saw her back, which he had always looked at tenderly, always stroked as he passed if he could. He was thinking about how he’d never cared particularly what Elsa looked like from behind. No, that wasn’t it. What he had thought was: that woman could be anyone, a stranger.

  The thought had suddenly taken on the strength of a horror. Elsa had evolved a series of gestures and expressions that he wasn’t a part of, that he could never make his home in, and now she was suddenly a stranger.

  The realization had a weirdly triumphant flavor. As if he’d been given a reason for his vague feelings of hostility. If I feel this much hate, he thought, love must be a lie.

  He remembered how he had believed that he hated the way Elsa popped a bite of sandwich in her mouth, her way of combing her hair or dishing vegetables onto a plate to cover exactly one quarter of its surface.

  He also hated the way she took care of Ella when she came home. She monopolized her, invented her own rituals with her
daughter so that he was left out of them. And the little girl turned to Elsa like the sun, always staying close to her, wanting to be held, cuddled.

  Their bitterest fights had been in those days after Elsa returned home. When they were fighting he would make a note of her every gesture, every rise and fall of her body, like a clinician gathering observations for a report.

  Often days would go by in this strange, rarified atmosphere. Elsa would gaze out the window, caress the girl but speak to her only a little, and look like she longed to be back at work, traveling, away from here.

  And then, out of nowhere, a fight would start. Elsa would lash out at him with the words they always used, familiar words, finding just the right ones.

  It had been one of those evenings when he stood in the doorway watching her perform some ordinary task.

  He let the thought come into his mind: I don’t love you. At the moment that he let himself think that, he was able to see Elsa whole.

  This woman: brown hair, glasses, her skirt a little tight around her thighs, heavy breasts that had fed one child placid under her blouse. A woman who had a whole store of the right words, many of them gentle ones, a woman who could hide her tiredness better than anyone he knew. Elsa was always careful not to show herself to strangers. This woman absorbed in some activity, ironing a shirt, folding sheets or leafing through papers. Sunk in her thoughts, starting to slump.

  What is it? she had asked. Have you been standing there long?

  She had looked up at him as if she were embarrassed that he was watching her without her knowing it.

  You’re beautiful.

  Ah, she said, flustered. She smiled, bent down to pick up another piece of clothing—she must have been ironing, not leafing through papers.

  I don’t know if I love you anymore.

  She looked at him, surprised, received the words like a sudden slap, not yet realizing their power.

  He had thought, this is the crossroads. If he continued life the way they were used to, if he thought of her as the girl she’d been when they met, he couldn’t be close to her.